The Chocolate Slave

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The Chocolate Slave

November 4, 2007

One could be forgiven for thinking of this as the year of William Wilberforce. The latest appearance of the great agitator occurred this week at Hull when the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu gave the Annual William Wilberforce Lecture and homed in on chocolate. Apparently the Brits are addicted and spend more than 4 billion English Pounds on chocolate each year (= 8.2 billion USD).

However the lecture wasn’t about addiction or health but slavery. Ruth Gledhill reported in the Times, “More than 12,000 child slaves and trafficked child labourers are working in Ivory Coast harvesting 43 per cent of the world's chocolate cocoa beans, according to Stop the Traffik.”

The Archbishop appealed not for a boycott on firms that source their cocoa from such areas, but for a positive choice to buy only Fairtrade chocolate which is made by companies that pay farmers a fair price for their produce (apparently Starbucks is one of the retailers of Fairtrade products).

The alleged cartels on the Ivory Coast are only one aspect of a world wide exploitation of poor people. The story of the chocolate slavery is told in a book by an investigative journalist Carol Off, called Bitter Chocolate. Apparently she followed the story after another journalist was murdered while investigating the story of cocoa bean farming.

Good on John Sentamu for raising the issue. Perhaps if it is not really the year of William Wilberforce it is the Year of Slavery. We Christians who read about slavery in the Bible are often troubled that it appears to be accepted, or at least not opposed. But while slavery in the Greco-Roman world could be cruel, it was could also be seen as a normal part of the social structure which provided livelihoods to many people. It should not be seen through the lens of 18^th and 19^th century European slavery.

But neither can we imagine that the modern world has clean hands or that the ending of the slave trade in the 19^th century actually ended slavery. The increase in globalised wealth, the break-down of stable government and the increase in civil wars and tribal and gang conflict has exposed a huge part of the human race to exploitation – especially women and children.

If you have read this far you may be trying to remember how many similar “issues” you have read about in the last 20 years (sweat shop shoe manufacturers, Nile perch, …). Issue fatigue is real. So is world fatigue. But a nice cup of coffee and some smooth chocolate might make it go away.

Or it could make it worse.

Dale

Comments

So, where does one get this Fair Trade chocolate in Jakarta? In the meantime, what can we do? Keep our fingers crossed that the chocolate we are eating doesn't come from those particular sources? How can we find out?

Posted by Robert on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 05:55:33

Have a look here.

Posted by Dale on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 06:05:00

Yes, but that only tells you where to buy it in the UK, not in Jakarta.

Posted by Robert on Thursday, November 1, 2007 at 09:13:32

I think you can order the chocolate in the internet. You can pay it by credit card or transfer through Money gram or something like that, and then they will send it to your house. By the way, I'm also interested to buy it, maybe we can join in one order, and it will reduce the shipping order.

Posted by Lidia on Friday, November 9, 2007 at 05:46:44